While each state bans certain books from their prisons, Texas’s statewide policies are especially strict and arbitrary, Thu-Huong Ha reports in Quartz.

“[A]nd the rules aren’t clear or consistent” either, Ha adds, given that the 15,000 books that Texas bans include books about race and sexuality such as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, but not racist texts such as Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf or David Duke’s My Awakening.

Ultimately, “Its guidelines are designed to keep out books that promote or instruct on criminal behavior,” the article reads, including those with “graphic scenes of ‘sexual behavior that is in violation of the law,’ ‘instructions on how to make weapons or drugs’ or instructions on how to break down prison systems or create ‘criminal schemes’ without getting caught.”

Yet the list also includes book as diverse as Jenna Bush’s Ana’s Story: A Journey of Hope, Senator Bob Dole’s World War II: An Illustrated History of Crisis and Courage, Jon Stewart’s America, John Updike’s Villages, and Flannery O’Connor’s Everything that Rises Must Converge.

Recently, Dan Slater’s new nonfiction book, Wolf Boys, was banned from all Texas prisons before it was even published this month. The book is about two Mexican American teens in Texas involved in violent cartels; it was banned, a Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesperson said, for its “information on how to conceal and smuggle illegal narcotics.”

The deputy director for American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, Deborah Caldwell Stone, called this decision on Wolf Boys, as well as the practice of banning books generally, “truly tragic,” according to the Guardian. “There is probably a new story every day like this,” Stone said.

Texas’s rate of incarceration is among the worst in the country, with .5% of its total population in prison.

If you are interested in donating books to a prison, here is a guide to help you.

Photo credit: AP Photo/Mike Groll.

Related reading: “Without the authentic stories of immigrants, women, LGBT people, and Muslims, people will be come more entrenched in their view of those groups as the Other,” writes Jessica Herthel in the Guardian.